The best books about Asian Americans

WINNER OF THE JOHN LEONARD PRIZE AT THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARDS AND THE FERRO-GRUMLEY AWARD FOR LGBTQ FICTION
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

'So's distinctive voice is ever-present: mellifluous, streetwise and slightly brash, at once cynical and bighearted...unique and quintessential' Sunday Times

'So's stories reimagine and reanimate the Central Valley, in the way that the polyglot stories in Bryan Washington's collection Lot reimagined Houston and Ocean Vuong's novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous allowed us to see Hartford in a fresh light.' Dwight Garner, New York Times

'[A] remarkable debut collection' Hua Hsu, The New Yorker

A Roxane… show more.

Explore the challenges faced by Asian professionals and how to overcome them.

A SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA BOOK FESTIVAL AWARD WINNER
A NEW ENGLAND BOOK FESTIVAL AWARD WINNER
A PINNACLE BOOK AWARD WINNER

"A must-read if you're ready to unlock your full potential!"
-Tiffany Pham, Founder and CEO, Mogul

Find your voice, own your story, and elevate your professional life. In The Visibility Mindset: How Asian American Leaders Create Opportunities and Push Past Barriers, Chao and Lam deliver an engaging and enlightening treatment of how Asian American professional leaders have powered through the obstacles in their way. Exploring a variety of myths,… show more.

For fans of Jenny Han, Jane Austen, and The Great British Baking Show, A Taste for Love, is a delicious rom com about first love, familial expectations, and making the perfect bao.

To her friends, high school senior Liza Yang is nearly perfect. Smart, kind, and pretty, she dreams big and never shies away from a challenge. But to her mom, Liza is anything but. Compared to her older sister Jeannie, Liza is stubborn, rebellious, and worst of all, determined to push back against all of Mrs. Yang's traditional values, especially when it comes to dating.

The one thing mother… show more.

"Will leave a mark on your heart." Stephanie Garber, author of the Caraval series

"A smart romance with heart and guts and all the intoxicating feelings in between." Maureen Johnson, author of 13 Little Blue Envelopes

Falling in love wasn't part of the plan.

Eliza Quan fully expects to be voted the next editor in chief of her school paper. She works hard, she respects the facts, and she has the most experience. Len DiMartile is an injured star baseball player who seems to have joined the paper just to have something to do. Naturally, the staff picks Len to… show more.

A NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST

"Brilliant, honest, and equal parts heartbreaking and soul-healing." --Laurie Halse Anderson, author of SHOUT 

"A singular voice in the world of literature." --Jason Reynolds, author of Long Way Down

A powerful coming-of-age story about grief, guilt, and the risks a Filipino-American teenager takes to uncover the truth about his cousin's murder.

Jay Reguero plans to spend the last semester of his senior year playing video games before heading to the University of Michigan in the fall. But when he discovers that his Filipino cousin Jun was murdered as part of President Duterte's war on drugs,… show more.

Dazzling and ambitious, this multivoiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America's struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco near the end of the 1960s. As Karen Tei Yamashita's motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies, and personal turmoil.

The tenth anniversary edition of this National Book Award finalist brings the joys and struggles of the I Hotel to a whole new generation of readers, historians,… show more.

Heartfelt personal accounts from Asian American women on their experiences with skin color bias, from being labeled "too dark" to becoming empowered to challenge beauty standards
"I have a vivid memory of standing in my grandmother's kitchen, where, by the table, she closely watched me as I played. When I finally looked up to ask why she was staring, her expression changed from that of intent observer to one of guilt and shame. . . . 'My anak (dear child),' she began, 'you are so beautiful. It is a shame that you are so dark. No Filipino man will ever… show more.

"The little girl I was would have been thrilled to encounter Meilan... having found a character who embraces the complexity of being both Chinese and American, I would have been able to echo her words: 'I am not alone.'"
-New York Times Book Review by Jean Kwok

A family feud before the start of seventh grade propels Meilan from Boston's Chinatown to rural Ohio, where she must tap into her inner strength and sense of justice to make a new place for herself in this resonant debut.

Meilan Hua's world is made up of a few key ingredients: her family's… show more.

A graphic novel about friendship, belonging and feeling
comfortable in your own skin!
Trying out for middle school cheerleader means: performing in
the giant school gym, with the whole school watching, and risking
total humiliation. If Christina can make it through this, she can
make it through anything.

As one of the only Asian American kids in her small Texas town,
Christina just wants to fit in. Luckily, her best
friend, Megan, who is Iranian American, can totally relate. The
two girls have always been inseparable and relish creating elaborate
fantasy worlds together.

But middle school is a reality-check, and… show more.

This casebook presents interdisciplinary, critical perspectives on race and racism and covers the roles of law and history in shaping the meanings of race in the United States. Updates the second edition with new material on: President Obama's election and "post-racialism"; important studies of implicit bias; the Voting Rights Act and allegedly race-neutral restrictions on voting; recurring violence against and harassment of Latino immigrants; book-banning in Arizona; and demographic changes and their implications. Includes new cases such as Shelby County v. Holder and Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action, current statistics, and updated references. Features rich historical treatment of… show more.

The debut novel from critically-acclaimed and New York Times–bestselling author of On Such a Full Sea and My Year Abroad.

In Native Speaker, author Chang-rae Lee introduces readers to Henry Park. Park has spent his entire life trying to become a true American—a native speaker. But even as the essence of his adopted country continues to elude him, his Korean heritage seems to drift further and further away.

Park's harsh Korean upbringing has taught him to hide his emotions, to remember everything he learns, and most of all to feel an overwhelming sense of alienation. In other words, it has… show more.

Winner of the Newbery Medal

"A charming, intriguingly plotted novel."-Washington Post

Newbery Medalist Erin Entrada Kelly's Hello, Universe is a funny and poignant neighborhood story about unexpected friendships.

Told from four intertwining points of view-two boys and two girls-the novel celebrates bravery, being different, and finding your inner bayani (hero). "Readers will be instantly engrossed in this relatable neighborhood adventure and its eclectic cast of misfits."-Booklist

In one day, four lives weave together in unexpected ways. Virgil Salinas is shy and kindhearted and feels out of place in his crazy-about-sports family. Valencia Somerset, who is deaf, is smart, brave, and… show more.

The No. 1 Sunday Times and New York Times bestseller from literary sensation R.F. Kuang

*A Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick*

'Propulsive' SUNDAY TIMES

'Razor-sharp' TIME

'A wild ride' STYLIST

'Darkly comic' GQ

'A riot' PANDORA SYKES

'Hard to put down, harder to forget' STEPHEN KING

Athena Liu is a literary darling and June Hayward is literally nobody.

White lies
When Athena dies in a freak accident, June steals her unpublished manuscript and publishes it as her own under the ambiguous name Juniper Song.

Dark humour
But as evidence threatens June's stolen success, she will discover exactly how far she… show more.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • “A shattering and darkly comic send-up of racial stereotyping in Hollywood” (Vanity Fair) and adeeply personal novel about race, pop culture, immigration, assimilation, and escaping the roles we are forced to play.

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant,… show more.

A young adult graphic novel about three foreign exchange students and the pleasures, and difficulties, of adjusting to living in Japan.

Living in a new country is no walk in the park-Nao, Hyejung, and Tina can all attest to that. The three of them became fast friends through living together in the Himawari House in Tokyo and attending the same Japanese cram school. Nao came to Japan to reconnect with her Japanese heritage, while Hyejung and Tina came to find freedom and their own paths. Though each of them has her own motivations and challenges, they all deal with language… show more.

One morning, Deming Guo's mother, an undocumented Chinese immigrant named Polly, goes to her job at the nail salon and never comes home. No one can find any trace of her. With his mother gone, eleven-year-old Deming is left with no one to care for him. He is eventually adopted by two white college professors who move him from the Bronx to a small town upstate. They rename him Daniel Wilkinson in their efforts to make him over into their version of an "all-American boy." But far away from all he's ever known, Daniel struggles to reconcile his new life… show more.

This book provides a complex and intricate portrayal of Asian American high school girls - which has been an under-researched population - as cultural meditators, diasporic agents, and community builders who negotiate displacement and attachment in challenging worlds of the in-between. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork, Tomoko Tokunaga presents a portrait of the girls' hardships, dilemmas, and dreams while growing up in an interconnected world. This book contributes a new understanding of the roles of immigrant children and youth as agents of globalization and sophisticated border-crossers who have the power and agency to construct belonging and identity across… show more.

Poetry. Fiction. This anthology of fiction and poetry is a good introductory survey of Hawai'i literature. Selected from issues of the first eight years of BAMBOO RIDGE, The Hawaii Writers' Quarterly, it features the work of more than 50 writers and includes an introduction by the editors as well as an essay on Asian american literature in Hawai'i by Stephen Sumida.

"Picture me madly in love with this moving, tender, unapologetically honest book."—Becky Albertalli, #1 best-selling author of Simon Vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda

Danny Cheng has always known his parents have secrets. But when he discovers a taped-up box in his father's closet filled with old letters and a file on a powerful Bay Area family, he realizes there's much more to his family's past than he ever imagined.

Danny has been an artist for as long as he can remember and it seems his path is set, with a scholarship to RISD and his family's blessing to pursue the… show more.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In a powerful debut about modern-day motherhood, immigration, and identity, a pregnant Chinese woman stakes a claim to the American dream in California.

“Utterly absorbing.”—Celeste Ng • “A marvel of a first novel.”—O: The Oprah Magazine • “The most eye-opening literary adventure of the year.”—Entertainment Weekly

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • NPR • Real Simple

Holed up with other mothers-to-be in a secret maternity home in Los Angeles, Scarlett Chen is far from her native China, where she worked in a factory and fell in love with the… show more.